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Picsel decides to go for iPhone on patent infringements

It was apparent as soon as the iPhone first appeared that some of its remarkable innovations in the user interface were similar to a product already on the market - the Picsel GUI. Now, it seems Picsel has decided that the similarities are close enough to sue over.

In a brief, legally-stripped announcement, the Scottish-based software company has named the iPhone and iPod Touch devices as infringing its intellectual property.

The bare bones of the announcement are here:

February 13, 2009 (New York, NY) – Picsel (Research) Ltd. and Picsel Technologies Ltd. have brought a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple, Inc. involving the Apple® iPhone™ and iPod Touch™. In the lawsuit filed today by Nixon Peabody LLP on behalf of Picsel, the mobile platform provider whose technology has shipped more than 250 million units worldwide, alleges Apple’s iPhone infringes Picsel’s rapid redraw patent which enhances the user experience while navigating through on-screen content. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for Delaware.

Picsel claims that Apple has implemented a key component from Picsel’s mobile rendering functionality, which enables users to scan through all kinds of on-screen content without experiencing prolonged screen update cycles. Without Picsel’s technology, users can be subjected to prolonged delays while “zooming” and “panning” documents, web pages and images. This core rendering feature is a key contributor to the unique visual experience delivered by Picsel

The original Picsel GUI was shown several years ago, running on a wide variety of different handsets. The company is remarkable for its wealth of ARM-expert programmers, all of whom were introduced to computing in the 80s when Acorn first launched the chip in a desktop machine. As a result, it was able to perform tricks on Arm-based hardware, which operating systems on normal phones struggled to achieve.

Conspicuous on Picsel demonstrations was a gesture based zoom which the iPhone appears to emulate. But the Picsel platform went much further, offering symmatrical multi-processing and the ability to handle (and edit) native Word and PDF documents on ordinary Symbian phones.

The company’s customers include KDDI, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Palm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Sharp. In addition to Nixon Peabody, the Picsel legal team includes Morris Nichols Arsht & Tunnell in Wilmington, Delaware, Maclay Murray & Spens LLP in Glasgow, Scotland, and the Bristows law firm in London, England.

No further information was available at the time of publication, with sources quoting "legal reasons" for this.